Like I said in the other comment I am not really familiar with the various clouds. I self host. The console is a weird web based thing that isn't the same environment as your VMs (or their hypervisor). It's a barebones shell where you can mount your volumes and such, not actually boot or enter the vm. (Edit: This was incorrect) And if I remember correctly I probably did have to do some mounting there to create device files and such. I didn't really have much use for the console after that either. I will try to find the actual gist I followed.

Here's the gist I had used. It's really simple. https://gist.github.com/unixfox/05d661094e646947c4b303f19f9b...

Why would not have not done the dd bit on the console? I have no idea. Again possibly can't download the iso there?